Herhold: Halloween prankster outed 75 years later

This is the cemented-in cannon underneath the William McKinley statue in St. James park. As a Halloween prank 75 years ago, several teenagers lit an explosive inside the gun and blew out the windows of the courthouse across the street. (Karen T. Borchers/Mercury News)

Beneath the statue of William McKinley in San Jose's St. James Park, aimed at the old Santa Clara County courthouse, sits a 12-pound bronze cannon, a U.S. Navy howitzer cast in 1870.

To ensure it won't be fired, the barrel of the cannon was filled long ago with concrete. And thereby hangs one of the more intriguing Halloween stories in San Jose history.

On Halloween 1932, a trio of youths exploded a charge in the cannon, breaking the windows of the courthouse across First Street and toppling the gun from its mounts.

For three-quarters of a century, the identities of the Halloween artillerymen have been closely guarded secrets. But thanks to a revelation from a San Josehistorian, as well as some sleuthing, I can identify one and point to another.

The story really begins more than a century ago, on May 13, 1901, when then-President McKinley visited San Jose, four months before his assassination in Buffalo, N.Y.

After the Republican president was killed, San Joseans built a granite-and-bronze statue in his honor at a cost of $13,000, the equivalent of almost $300,000 today. Presumably to emphasize McKinley's muscular foreign policy, the side facing the courthouse featured the 12-pound cannon.

Three decades later, the Halloween pranksters weren't thinking of the record of the nation's 25th president. If the story is right, it all had to do with a bet.

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My source on the matter was historian and Superior Court Judge Paul Bernal, who during a recent courthouse tour identified one conspirator as Larry Zetterquist (1914-71), a San Jose bartender who had a reputation as a raconteur and ladies' man.

To check it out, I called Zetterquist's nephew, Jim Zetterquist, a member of the Preservation Action Council and a San Jose history buff, too. He filled in some of the blanks.

Exploding tree stumps

Larry Zetterquist came from a large San Jose family that lived on Anita Street, a long-gone street near the Guadalupe River. His father was a Swedish immigrant and his mother was distantly related to Tiburcio Vasquez, the famous bandit who was hanged in San Jose in 1875.

In the fall of 1932, Zetterquist was an 18-year-old high school dropout. As the story goes, he and his friends had a job blowing up tree stumps. Somehow, they fell to speculating about whether the explosive they used could fracture the then-unplugged McKinley cannon.

The story goes that the youths decided to test the matter. On Halloween night, the three stuffed explosives into the cannon and lit the charge.

Shocked when it blew out windows in the courthouse, some 35 yards away, they "hightailed it out of there," Jim Zetterquist said.

Exactly how many windows were broken has been lost to history. (The courthouse, deftly remodeled after a 1931 fire, has 20 that face the park.) A newspaper story the next day said there were "several." The windows were made of expensive French plate glass, framed by cast iron.

Meanwhile, the force of the blast hurled the cannon from its bronze mounts. While police briefly held two men at the scene, they never found the real culprits.

Jim says he got the story from his father, Herman, a straight-arrow who was close to his older, more renegade brother. Both were superb athletes, although Larry suffered a teenage hip injury that effectively ended his athletic ambitions. "He was definitely a character," Jim Zetterquist says.

Accomplices murky

Who were his co-conspirators? Here I'll confess to being on soggier ground. Jim Zetterquist told me that one of the teens with Larry on Halloween also allegedly played a role in the Nov. 26, 1933, lynching of Jack Holmes and Harold Thurmond, the two men who had been accused of kidnapping and killing department store heir Brooke Hart.

According to the story Jim Zetterquist heard from his father, this youth contributed to the lynching by returning to his family ranch and grabbing the rope. That description seems to fit one man: Anthony Cataldi, a then-18-year-old who was the only one of the lynching party to boast about it publicly, giving an interview to United Press about how he got the rope.

Cataldi later disavowed that statement, but he was identified as one of the lynchers in Harry Farrell's book on the case, "Swift Justice."

I called Cataldi's 80-year-old sister in Sacramento. She told me she had never heard of Zetterquist or the broken windows. She was only 5 at the time of the courthouse caper. But it's fair to acknowledge that the identification of Cataldi in the Halloween blast is hearsay upon hearsay.

We know this: Standard justice was shattered on the night when Holmes and Thurmond were lynched. What makes for an intriguing footnote - a clue in concrete - is that the shattering had a more innocent and literal precursor on Halloween a year before. Chalk it up to the ghosts of William McKinley.